San Antonio Spurs team preview

i used to really hate vanilla ice cream. it was bland and stupid and white, and it wasn't chocolate goddamnit. eventually--after i discovered the wonders of pie--vanilla ice cream grew on me like a creeper vine on a wooden trellis. pie and vanilla ice cream are delicious together; pie and chocolate or strawberry or rocky road? fuck that. it's gross, and you know what i mean.

now, ask yourselves why i would start a team preview with a talk about vanilla ice cream? because it's the spurs, that's why. the most boring team possibly ever. although let it be said that i do like myself some tony parker on occaision, mainly because he's my all-time favorite point guard in nba 2k7. other than him, what do you say?

this is a roster not designed to lend itself to superlatives.

tim duncan, the undisputed leader, is legendary for the fact that he's consistent on a level that's absolutely sickening. i'm not kidding. next time i see a 20/10/3 season from tim duncan i think i will empty the contents of my lunch into the nearest trash can or other receptacle. i'm joking, but only kind of.

the basic premise of the spurs as it has once been described is that they assemble a team of three good-great players and fill out the rest of the roster with people willing to run through a brick wall to win. that is an incredibly accurate portrait of the spurs as i know them, and explains why flight white has toiled away on the d-league team, unable to showcase his inSANE dunking skills to the largest audience imaginable.

but because flight isn't on the roster, the spurs will keep winning. there are no players that could reasonably called laconic on their roster. every single spur lives and dies by the bounce of the round ball. none of them have shoe deals, etc. etc. with the possible exception of tony parker, who is married to someone who will probably one day bang their teenaged gardener while tony's away at work.

the spurs will probably win the west again unless they somehow take a giant dump in the bed this year. bo-ring, but some people like it. if i could only find the damn pie.

prediction 60-22, t-1st in southwest division

your playoffs stink

my nba fandom is seriously in the at-risk category. if my fandom were a species it would be: endangered.

the warriors getting bounced was bad enough, although i can kind of rest easier at night knowing that they were done in by a team captained by the kind of hard-nosed visionary that deserves to have won more than zero championships in his career. i'm even willing to look the other way as every single replay showed carlos boozer shoving warriors in the back as he went for rebounds.

THAT'S OK BY ME.

as long as the players themselves are deciding the series, shit i can tolerate the disney-movie-villainy that the jazz call playoff basketball. the warriors WERE like an all-black disney movie, with matt barnes being the prodigy that nellie must save from himself. etc. i'm pretty disappointed in myself that i never saw the parallel sooner but c'est la vie.

on the other hand, the suns were done in by stupidity in the league office. yes, i'm aware that leaving the bench mandates a one-game suspension but jesus h: it's the playoffs. if anything, suspend them for the first game of the regular season or fine the shit out of them but don't take amare stoudemire out of the biggest series of the playoffs. STAT could have saved us from this hellish fate: four teams we can't help but rooting against battling it out for eventual supremacy.

i guess i have to root for the jazz and cavs, but in all probability we're looking at detroit and san antonio taking turns hosting the nba finals. just shoot me.

no fun league

seriously it's time to change the abbreviated name of the nba to the nfl. (no fun league get it? i'm so clever.)

these playoffs, with the noted and notable exception of the warriors--who i fear may be going down in flames after this latest near miss against utah-- are boooooooooring. even the normally exciting suns seem to have a going through the paces feel to them. maybe it's the new "intense" steve nash, but there just isn't the same positive energy around the suns that there used to be. banning diaw to the bench probably affected their feng shui in more ways then d'antoni could have ever suspected, but their pick and roll game is just not doing it for me.

i do have some excuse; they played my favorite team in the league during the first round and are playing a spurs team that is incredibly adept at shifting gears into whatever they feel like. honestly the suns are like a nervous student driver and the spurs have their own gas and brake pedal. this is ridiculous. suns: get out and run for chrissakes before i ball up socks and start chucking them at the tv at random intervals.

the entire point of the suns before this season was that they didn't obsess over execution on offense. they flowed freely and enabled nash to make some insanely lucid and acrobatic decisions passing the ball, which in turn allowed STAT+matrix+et. al. to finish shit at the rim HARD. now, we see them running picks and rolls and the spurs defend them by the book and nash gets his jumpers and there isn't any more thunder. keep in mind as i'm writing this that EVERYTHING I'M SAYING COULD BE A CREDIT TO THE SPURS.

seriously, maybe i'm missing them ole suns just because the spurs have them tied up in the trunk of the car and are going over speed bumps. as i mentioned above the spurs are adept at making people play by their style, so this is perhaps all about that. i sure hope so, and i hope the suns and warriors both advance so we can have the most entertaining nba finals ever. (yeah, the east sucks so i'm pretending it doesn't exist until lebron has at least 1 more awesome game.)

The Sun Switches Horizons

Basketball and life are cyclical.

Since 1999, the Lakers and Spurs have dominated the universe with the exception of the 2004 anomaly. The East has been dominated by subpar teams of late-- even the Heat last year were broken for a champion. It was only due to injuries or chaos that any Eastern team has risen to the ultimate pedestal of late, but dominance is swinging back across the center of the country.

With the infusion of 'Mek, G Walls, 'Bron, Bosh, Villanueva, Dwight, and even Public Enemy Number 1, the East's underdog status is in danger of disappearing for the next decade. The West's collapse is imminent, unless sustained by the creative forces that summoned both PHX and DAL.

With Colangelo's departure that invention is looking less and less imminent. The East is embracing a new age of basketball player, while the West attempts to replicate that success with entire teams.

One of those two is sustainable. I guess we'll find out.